The Podcast Standards Project
The Podcast Standards Project is a new initiative to promote the use of open standards, as in RSS, as the backbone for podcasting-content delivery. The project is created at a time when big VC-backed companies are piggy-backing onto the current podcasting hype to lock listeners into their platforms.
The environment out of which The Podcast Standards Project sprang is not unlike the environment from which The Web Standards Project (WaSP), a similar consortium established to protect the open nature of the web, emerged in its early years:
“When The Web Standards Project (WaSP) formed in 1998, the web was the battleground in an ever-escalating war between two browser makers—Netscape and Microsoft—who were each taking turns ‘advancing’ HTML to the point of collapse. You see, in an effort to one-up each other, the two browsers introduced new elements and new ways of manipulating web documents; this escalated to the point where their respective 4.0 versions were largely incompatible.” (source)
This bears a strong resemblance to podcasting today. Without the establishment of PSP and the support of its allies, podcasting risks becoming a closed environment held captive by only a handful of dominant players who may have competing, commercially-defined priorities that drive disjoined, proprietary visions of podcasting’s future.
I’m not huge on podcasts, but any effort to keep a part of the Web open and accessible, despite big corporations’ worst intentions to wall it off, is a worthwhile effort.